SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attend an event to pitch AI for businesses in Tokyo, Japan Feb. 3, 2025.
Kim Kyung-Hoon | Reuters
SoftBank posted a $2.4 billion gain at its Vision Fund in the December quarter as a jump in the value of its OpenAI investment helped offset losses in some of its other bets.
The Japanese giant said it made a $4.2 billion gain on the value of its OpenAI investment in its fiscal third quarter, which runs to the end of December, offsetting losses stemming from the share price declines of Coupang and Chinese ride-hailing app Didi.
The company also said investment losses were impacted by a markdown in its stake in TikTok creator ByteDance.
This helped SoftBank Group book fiscal third-quarter net profit of 248.6 billion yen ($1.6 billion), which missed analyst estimates, but was a reversal of the loss seen in the same period last year.
With the Vision Fund, SoftBank has invested in AI companies it believes will be category winners, seeking to position itself at the center of the technology’s development.
OpenAI in focus
This includes a more than $30 billion investment in ChatGPT developer OpenAI as one of its core companies. SoftBank owns approximately 11% of OpenAI.
SoftBank said it had seen a $17 billion gain on its OpenAI investment during the April to December period.
Investors have been focused on how SoftBank will fund its continued investments, particularly in OpenAI, which currently remains unprofitable.
The Japanese investment giant has been trimming its stakes in other companies to funnel money toward OpenAI. In October, SoftBank sold its entire stake in Nvidia for $5.83 billion and between June and December, it sold $12.73 billion worth of T-Mobile stock.
SoftBank has also taken out loans backed by its other holdings, such as chip designer Arm. As it continues to bet on OpenAI, the company is facing increased competition from the likes of Google and Anthropic.
SoftBank’s chip businesses
SoftBank said Thursday it has created a new segment in its earnings report called the “AI Computing Segment.” This will include chip designer Arm, as well as Graphcore and Ampere, two other semiconductor businesses it has acquired.
The segment lost 91.8 billion yen in the nine months ending in December due to a higher headcount and acquisition-related costs associated with Ampere, SoftBank said.
SoftBank sees Arm and its other chip investments as key to playing in areas from robotics to driverless cars and data centers.
SoftBank shares have jumped this week after strong results at its telecommunications unit and a rally in the price of Arm’s stock.